Don’t Do It, Harper Lee

THE news was greeted online with tweets and tumbles of enthusiasm and joy: Harper Lee, the writer who swore she would never publish another book after the instant classic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” had changed her mind. Her new book will be released in July.

Or, not a new book, but an old one, written decades ago. And it’s not an entirely new story either, but a companion of sorts to “Mockingbird,” actually written before that novel.

The forthcoming title, “Go Set a Watchman,” involves the same beloved Finch family, with Scout all grown up and Atticus still at work and their little Alabama town in a new state of turmoil.

Those eager masses, now overflowing with unconditional love for a book they have not read, propelling it to No. 1 on Amazon Wednesday, will be the very people wielding pitchforks if Ms. Lee’s second book does not live up to expectations that have been building for decades.

The form the literary conversation takes has changed drastically since the initial publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in 1960, when professional critics led the public discussion and private assessments were confined to classrooms and parlors. Internet culture, where a one-star Goodreads review by a 14-year-old can be as persuasive to some as a book critic’s 1,200-word newspaper essay, has leveled the field.

We are, after all, in the age of the hot take, the contrarian opinion and obsessive fan culture, in which celebrated work belongs solely to the rabid enthusiasts, not its creator. I’ve worked as a literary critic, mostly online, for 13 years, and the only time I feared for my life was when I blogged that the Harry Potter books were terrible. (“Literati? Try Litersnotty!” was my favorite response.)

Maybe it seems unfair to compare “To Kill a Mockingbird” to a children’s epic fantasy series, but the sense of connection that each inspires is similar. Most of us came to “Mockingbird” as children, or at least teenagers, and our attachments to books we love while growing up are much more emotional than those to stories we pick up as adults. Atticus and Scout are more than just characters in a book; they are family.

And those of us who think the book is perfect, who went on to construct our own adventures for our favorite father-daughter team, might feel less forgiving if our fantasy does not line up with Ms. Lee’s. It’s not only the fans that Ms. Lee has to look out for. While her first novel is firmly established in the canon, it is not universally supported. It has been under attack for years by some serious critics for being simplistic and problematic in a privileged-white-lady-solves-the-race-issue kind of way. Then there is the annoyingly enduring rumor that the book was really written by Ms. Lee’s friend Truman Capote.

The contemporary literary gatekeepers do not believe in gods (except perhaps for David Foster Wallace) and they enjoy tearing down false idols. There is a very good chance that this work, rejected by Ms. Lee’s original editor in the ’50s, may be substandard. And some critics say it’s not entirely clear that the 88-year-old Ms. Lee actually decided to publish this work herself.

It would be nice to think that whatever happens with “Go Set a Watchman,” even if the book really is not good at all, Ms. Lee’s place in literary history — and that of “Mockingbird” — will remain intact. We may not be able to remember anything from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” follow-ups, but their failures do not move the original’s place from our hearts. The canon, however, is a fickle thing. What is classic one moment is outdated or surprisingly flawed the next.

For every late-career comeback that only further proves a person’s genius and worth — think of Coco Chanel’s coming out of roughly 15 years of retirement to dominate the Paris fashion scene once again — there are 20 people who fall on their faces and die before they can recover their footing. The best-selling and critically heralded author W. Somerset Maugham was manipulated by a newspaper proprietor and his caretaker to write and serialize his memoirs, despite his senility. “Looking Back” was too candid and unfiltered about the reasons for his divorce and estrangement from his daughter, and it was very poorly received by critics and Maugham’s audience.

But it wasn’t only reception to the memoirs that was negative. Critics took the opportunity to reconsider the entirety of his life’s work, and it was relabeled from classic to dusty and old-fashioned, out of step with his peers and lacking in style.

“Maybe she was, in some sense, satisfied. Maybe her deed was done.” That’s how one recent biographer, Charles J. Shields, explained Ms. Lee’s silence after her initial success. For decades we have wondered: Why doesn’t she write more? Why hasn’t she published anything else?

We have been greedy. One great book is enough. The appetite for more Harper Lee (and more J. D. Salinger, among others) stems from wanting to recreate that first encounter. That moment we went from not having read “To Kill a Mockingbird” to having read and loved “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

But we can’t wipe the past and go back into it anew. And sometimes when our high expectations come crashing down, it’s not only our emotions that bear the brunt of the fall. Sometimes we take others out with us.